The freely recovering arc in a constant-pressure flow

Experiments have been performed which show that the electrical conductance decay of an arc in uniform axial flow may be related to that of a corresponding wall-stabilized arc. This relationship leads to the possibility of evolving a time-dependent integral method to give a simplified description of transient-arc behaviour in uniform flow. The experiments were performed on atmospheric-pressure-nitrogen arc columns sustained by currents in the range 20-40 A and subjected to flow velocities up to 25 m s −1 .